A time before astronauts

So this has the potential to be a bit embarrassing. I don’t usually open up my back catalog for just anyone to look into, since there are some mighty awkward skeletons hanging in there. I’m going to assume that if you’ve found this blog, you probably have some familiarity with my paintings of astronauts. But you likely don’t have much of an idea of what (if anything) came before that. I started working on my astronaut paintings in the latter part of 1999, which feels as long ago to me as it probably sounds to you. These paintings represent pretty much the entirety of my mature oeuvre. Or, more accurately, my immature oeuvre. Keen observers (or those with way too much time on their hands) will notice a distinct difference in my earliest works and the pieces I’ve completed more recently. The early works are decidedly more “painterly,” which, if you haven’t heard that term before, is basically a more pretentious way of saying “messy.”

The whole series started around the time I first moved to Boston, and was living on my own in the city for the first time. I had spent four years going to school up in New Hampshire (which can’t even be classified as the middle of nowhere since it was decidedly not in the middle of anything), followed by some time abroad in Italy and in Sydney, Australia. Being back in America, having a low paying job, taking the bus, going to the laundromat, buying groceries, watching copious amounts of VH1, and being bombarded by the advertising we mostly ignore was a pretty new experience for me, at the time. Add into the mix the dawning realization that the future I was promised as a child (living on the moon, robot best friends, musical montages filled with synthesizer music where I could be remarkably productive) was probably not going to happen. I was also reading a lot of post modern literature, like Don Delillo (White Noise) and David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest, a damn long book). This was where I was in life when it first occurred to me to paint astronauts.

That’s what will appear in my official biography whenever they get around to writing it (I’m waiting). But what I might or might not share in that eventually awesome book is that there was actually a period of about 6 months where, after graduating college and seeing the world, I was somewhat humiliatingly forced to live at home, unemployed, and taking classes in graphic design so that I could (hopefully) get a job. During this time, I was quite literally trapped between adulthood and childhood. Thankfully for me, it was only a brief time. I kept busy by doing a lot of writing and a lot of painting. Unsurprisingly, my art work from this period also lands somewhere between my college work and my later astronaut paintings. I was for the first time starting to figure things out technically. Unlike my largely mediocre collegiate work, I was making somewhat competent paintings. But during my time in school, like a lot of art students, I returned again and again to self-portraiture. Partly this was because of convenience – all I needed was a mirror. But also it was because I was very introspective (or self-involved, depending on whether you want to be mean about it), and there was not a lot going on in my world for me to really talk about. The only thing I knew at all was myself (and, as it happens, I didn’t even know that particularly well). And so, in this time of forced solitude, alone in the suburbs of Boston, without too much else to think about, I returned to self portraits.

But these differed a bit from earlier attempts. In college, my self-portraits were largely either academic studies (How do I draw? How do I paint? Lets find out by painting myself), or were inspired by an over-indulgent self angst fueled by an ill-fated devotion to the music of Nine Inch Nails (Ugh. We’ve all been there, right?). But out of school now, a little more self aware, and a bit less angsty (traded in the NIN for Bowie and the Wu Tang Clan), I became more interested in the early works of Cindy Sherman, and the portrait work of Andy Warhol. I was still overly interested in myself as subject matter, but I become much more intrigued by the idea of painting myself as someone else. I really liked the idea of playing a role in my artwork. I was watching a lot of music videos (they still had those at the time) and became slightly obsessed with the fish eye lens look made famous by Hype Williams in videos for Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliott (among others). I was fascinated by celebrity, and the idea that I could make myself a celebrity in my paintings. These were the earliest incarnations of ideas that I later incorporated into my astronaut paintings. But at the time, all I could think to do was more self portraits. And so that’s what I did for the 6 months or so I lived at home.

I worked on these paintings for a while until they started getting a bit too weird. There’s only so many pairs of sunglasses and hats you can wear before you start realizing that they’re just props. I also at this time became aware of the work of Susanna Coffey, who basically was doing the same thing, only a whole lot better. When I got a job, moved out of my parent’s house into a place of my own in the city, and met my future wife, I realized that I had grown up (at least a little), and also outgrown the self-portrait (and future wife found them a bit creepy, truth be told. Like usual, she was probably right). I decided to make stories about things in the world larger than myself. I felt the need for a character to appear in these stories, a protagonist if you will, but I did not want him to be me. While pondering these ideas, near the dawn of the new millenium, I watched Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, and the rest, as they say, is history (or the future). And I never really looked back.

But now that I’ve been doing this a while, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share a little bit of personal history with you. Aside from family and a few friends, I never really showed these paintings to anyone. In the grand scheme of things, they might only be interesting as a counter point to the astronaut paintings that came after them (if at all). But for anybody interested in the early days of my astronaut painting, or for those curious how one turns student work into something a little bit beyond that, hopefully you find them interesting. There’s a few more in the gallery below. A brief disclaimer: some are more than a little ridiculous, but in my defense: I was 22.